House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) slammed President Trump’s push to reopen the historic Alcatraz prison near San Francisco as “the stupidest initiative put forth by this administration” on Thursday.
“Being tough on crime is not turning Alcatraz, which won’t even be a prison for a long time to come — I don’t think it’ll ever happen,” Pelosi, a frequent Trump critic, said in an interview on MSNBC’s “Chris Jansing Reports.”
“This is not about being tough on crime. It’s being frivolous about money and silly about the choices they have made,” she added.
“I have said this is not only stupid, with stiff competition … the stupidest initiative put forth by this administration.”
Trump floated the idea of reopening the hulking Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in May to house “America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.” The president said this month that “conceptional work” started on the project six months ago with “various prison development firms” engaged.
“I wanted something representative to show how we fight back, and then, it happened, I saw a picture of ALCATRAZ looking so foreboding, and I said, ‘We’re going to look into renovating and rebuilding the famous ALCATRAZ Prison sitting high on the Bay, surrounded by sharks. What a symbol it is, and will be!’” Trump wrote in a July 1 post on Truth Social. “Still a little early, but lots of promise!”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Attorney General Pam Bondi visited the prison site on Thursday, with both touting efforts to turn the shuttered facility into a detention site.
“This administration is restoring safety, justice, and order to our streets,” Burgum wrote on the social platform X.
The Alcatraz prison was shuttered in 1963, with the Bureau of Prisons deeming it “too expensive to continue operating.” Alcatraz Island, located about a mile off the coast in the San Francisco Bay, now operates as a national park and attracts more than a million visitors each year.
“Right now, it’s a tourist attraction which has been a venue for art and community events, something that this administration doesn’t appreciate, obviously,” Pelosi said Thursday. “And, of course, the environmental concern is of no concern of theirs.”
Pelosi, who has represented a California district that covers most of San Francisco for nearly four decades, had earlier ripped the prison reopening idea in a written statement on Wednesday.
“It should concern us all that clearly the only intellectual resources the Administration has drawn upon for this foolish notion are decades-old fictional Hollywood movies,” she wrote.
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